berlin | Germany’s burgeoning Jewish community has ordained its first female rabbi since the Holocaust, a major step since most rabbis — most of them men — had been imported from abroad.
The Nov. 4 ordination of Alina Treiger, a Ukrainian-born 31-year-old, is a sign of the growing diversity of Germany’s largely conservative Jewish community, observers say, though some warned she will face an uphill battle among worshippers used to being led by male rabbis.
“I never thought becoming a rabbi was a possible profession for a woman,” acknowledged Treiger, who immigrated to Germany in 2002 after studying music in Moscow, to ZDF public television.
She has been chosen to oversee Jewish communities in Lower Saxony.
The Nov. 4 ceremonies at Berlin’s Pestalozzistrasse Synagogue marked the third ordination of graduates at Abraham Geiger College in Potsdam since the institution opened in 1999. In 2006, the school graduated the first male rabbis to be ordained in Germany since World War II.
Treiger follows in the footsteps of Regina Jonas, who became the first female rabbi when she was ordained in 1935, during the Nazi regime. Jonas managed to survive until 1944 when she was killed in Auschwitz, one of about 200,000 German Jews to perish in the Holocaust.
A handful of other female rabbis already work in Germany, but all were educated and ordained elsewhere.
Treiger will face some challenges. While Treiger’s ordination signals a step toward the liberalization of Germany’s small, tight-knit Jewish community, it remains dominated by Conservatives, said Albert Meyer, a former head of Berlin’s Jewish Community.
“The majority won’t accept it. For them it’s still strange that a woman will be a rabbi,” he said. “In America, it’s a very common thing, but here it’s still a sensation.”
However, German President Christian Wulff lauded Treiger’s ordination as a sign of the community’s vibrance.
“This not only fills the Jewish community with happiness, but it also shows that the Jewish life — the whole spectrum of Jewish life, from Orthodox to liberal — has taken root in our country again with intensity,” Wulff said. “So we are all happy today.”
By the end of World War II in 1945, just 10,000 to 15,000 Jews remained in Germany. It took 45 years for the number to double to 30,000, when East and West Germany reunited in 1990. A government policy that has streamlined immigration of Jews from the former Soviet states has helped the community swell to some 200,000 today, still a decided minority in a country of 82 million.
Treiger said that while she recognizes the Nazi genocide has a “deep meaning” to German Jews and that “our memory of our relatives is always with us,” she also hopes Jews are aware of the opportunities of life in Germany.
“For me personally it is very important that Jewish people identify with positive experiences, also for young people, and not only the negative,” she said.
JTA contributed to this report.